Persecution (9781609458744) by Piperno Alessandro; Goldstein Ann (TRN)

Author:Piperno, Alessandro; Goldstein, Ann (TRN)
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin USA
Published: 2012-03-27T16:00:00+00:00

He has merely to set foot outside the office of his new lawyer, his new mentor, still under the bracing effect that the encounter—the stream of memories and the sudden flash of some glimmer of hope—left him with, and find himself on the street in that equatorial climate, overwhelmed by hot gusts of August humidity, to feel again all the weight of what is happening to him.

He runs awkwardly to his car, parked in one of the side streets that flow into Via Veneto. Calm down, my boy, it’s nothing. Nothing happened. In fact, it all went better than you imagined. So pick yourself up, relax, and think of the next moves.

He has decided to follow the orders that Herrera imposed. He has the childish and military illusion that if he sticks to the instructions things will slowly return to order. It’s then that another thought, no less pernicious than all the others, slips in and almost makes him faint.

The money. Where to get all that money? A substantial sum: well within his means, certainly, but tremendously difficult for a super-incompetent of his type to obtain. Leo doesn’t know how much money he has. He’s not the one who thinks about those things. It’s Rachel who takes care of the bookkeeping and the bank accounts. He knows he has a good income and he has nearly unlimited trust in Rachel’s administrative capacities. He has always been grateful to her for not keeping him informed about the family accounts. For never having put a telephone or electric bill in front of him. For not keeping him up to date about her financial maneuvers.

That’s how he has always wanted to live: like one of those monarchs with unlimited credit, kissed by the privilege of not having to think about what for the common people is the dominant thought (yes, much more than love). He knows that over the years she has invested in real estate. But it’s all he knows. Like a spoiled child, he has been provided with credit cards and checkbook. Through those two sublime instruments he can count on all the money a man of his background and life style needs. And it has never occurred to him to be excessive in his purchases. He is immune to certain compulsions.

Now he realizes that he doesn’t even know if the apartments that Rachel bought are in his name. He remembers going several times in recent years to Emilio, a notary, also a childhood friend. And signing some papers while Emilio, as if he were in synagogue, recited some very boring litanies, written in an impossible style. He remembers typewritten sheets of ruled paper and he remembers above all the feeling of sleepiness that assailed him.

Evidently his terror of bureaucratic things manifests itself in a strange form of sloth and torpor, whose result is that now he doesn’t know what he has signed. The transfer of all that he has to his wife and children (which until a few weeks ago

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